News Review, CSPAN

Up next, we welcome Vladislav Plechinsky, who’s managing editor at the American Spectator and nation columnist Christopher Hitchens.

They join us this morning to discuss issues in the news over the weekend.

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Wally Plechinsky, managing editor of the American Spectator.

Robert Novak wrote in your publication in February, “But Bob Dole, for the most part, keeps cool

and is trying to give Brock and his team a free hand in running the campaign.

It seems to be working.

If inside the beltway, right wing activists ponder whether President Bush would give away more

to the Soviets through weakness than President Dole would through deviousness,

Republicans who’ve come to hear him on the stump perceive him as a true conservative.

” Do you think this stands?

Well, it has so many things in this campaign.

It’s not standing up that well because no one expected Dole to self-destruct as quickly as he did, in part because I think his campaign has

been in incredible disarray with Brock, probably the number one reason for that.

It didn’t get much attention, but the way Brock got rid of conservatives David Keane and Don

Devine a few weeks ago, kicking him off the campaign plane, was incredibly inept and I think symptomatic of the campaign.

Yesterday, Mary McGray wrote about pundits, Christopher Hitchens, and with that in mind

and saying pundits had been wrong a lot in this campaign, let me further read what Robert Novak said in the American Spectator.

“Dole, darling of the Washington lobbyists who proposes to solve the deficit problem through appointment of an elitist commission,

is selling himself as a populist, and the Republican voters are buying– [AUDIO OUT]

–all the work you have.

Well, it says that there, but for the grace of God, quite a number of us could have gone, I think.

Mary McGrawry made the very sobering point,

since you mentioned her, that the real discovery is that the voters don’t read what the pundits say.

So that the only people who they probably steer wrong are the candidates who care obsessively about the press and their image.

So I think there’s some hope in that, at any rate,

only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.

Why are we doing all this then?

I have no idea.

It beats me.

I mean, if you were starting now to design a system for picking the president

of the United States, it couldn’t possibly look anything like it does now.

Well, the press spends too much time covering the United States, not the world.

And the only story going, or the most exciting one, is the horse race, the presidential race.

And it seems each year it begins earlier and earlier.

And the press has to talk about something.

So they keep hyping up each campaign, each primary, each caucus as it comes along.

And fortunes are made and destroyed in a matter of days.

Let me show you a piece speaking of pundits from yesterday’s Washington Post.

And I’ve had three or four people mention it over the last 24 hours.

And here is the front page of the outlook section.

Most people that are involved in politics in Washington read it on Sundays.

Paul Taylor, political editor, says Dukakis versus Bush strike up the bland.

Is that what it’s going to be like if these two men are the candidates?

I think it’s a bit unfair to Dukakis myself.

I think it’s obviously true of Bush, who’s just a hole in the air, both as a person and a politician.

But I think with Dukakis, it may well

emerge that what people want is someone who is not showbiz, sensational, but who’s solid and who’s honest.

Well, the article is presuming that Dukakis will be the nominee.

And that’s by no means guaranteed.

Illinois is coming up in two days.

Senator Paul Simon has been leading very handily.

Supposedly, his lead is slipping.

But if it slips, Jesse Jackson will win in Illinois.

And what does that say about Dukakis?

Jimmy Carter lost in California, in Maryland, in June of 1976 in the primaries to Jerry Brown.

It was a little too late to derail him, but already indicated great weakness in Carter as a political man.

Well, we see this in Dukakis now.

If he can’t carry Illinois, how can he logically be the front runner and the nominee?

We’ve talked a lot about this man.

And he ends up this week on the cover of Newsweek.

And one poll, the Chicago Tribune this morning, shows him leading 32-29 to Senator Simon.

The Washington Post poll has a wider margin the other way.

What do you think of this man, Mr. Hitchens?

Well, I’m more and more impressed.

I’m much more impressed than I was last time, when he still seemed to be–

you should pardon the expression– but a slightly ghettoized candidate, I mean, both in the way he thought and in the way he spoke.

What’s impressive this time is he’s emerged really almost as a worker’s candidate, as a candidate for those

who have to earn money rather than make it, who are still probably a majority in this country,

and been able to make really striking impressions in unexpected parts of the country.

In spite of a really wretched coverage of the early part of his campaign, where people would simply look to see how white a state was

and say, well, he can’t do very well there, and where the bogus euphemism, unelectable, was used.

In effect, it would mean black.

Now, as my colleague Alex Coburn puts it,

the votes are in from the old slave-owning states of Maine and Alaska and places like that, and showing

very strong performance among white and blue-collar voters.

I think it’s the most impressive thing of the campaign.

It’s the only surge that hasn’t been done by image and done by consulting opinion polls.

He’s come from a real movement, a real feeling.

Well, Jackson is curious.

I mean, first I’m reminded of Amos Perlmutter’s– the late Nathan Perlmutter’s remark that suddenly people–

something to the effect that Jackson is being praised now for no longer being a bigot.

Well, on the face of it, we don’t really know.

The Jackson we have today is probably no different from the Jackson we had four years ago.

His political tactics might be a little shrewder, but that doesn’t say much.

And the fact that he’s doing so well, I think, testifies primarily to the weakness of the other Democratic candidates.

They’re just not making any impact.

And Jackson, who’s been running and running for years, is–

well, there’s a lot of name recognition.

There’s a lot of naivete.

He can be very charming, charismatic, no doubt.

But that doesn’t say his views have really changed or evolved from ’84.

He’s still essentially a third world type candidate.

He’s in his basic values.

He represents everything I think this country stands against.

He’s unelectable not because he is black, but simply because he is radical.

He’s extremely radical.

And people are naive if they don’t see that.

Let me mention that– you mentioned that he got off to a slow start with coverage, press coverage.

And this morning’s Washington Post,

Jack Carmody in his television column, talks about a survey that’s been released by the Center

for Media and Public Affairs of 532 election stories telecast on the three commercial networks.

January the 1st through Super Tuesday, March 8th, show that Democratic candidate

Jesse Jackson got the best by far with 74% favorable evaluation regarding

his job and campaign performance,

stands on issues, and assessments of character, and 90% positive horse race prediction.

Surprise you?

Yeah, I can only say it certainly didn’t feel like that.

And it certainly didn’t feel like that in the early stages of the campaign.

I think that it’s– I mean, as State Department people like to say, I haven’t yet seen the full text of that report.

But I imagine it would be for a later phase of the campaign.

Audiences looking at Newsweek inside, the power broker, this is the cover story for the week.

Ladi, what’s your reaction to those statistics?

Well, again, I don’t make– I mean, they disturb me in that people aren’t addressing

the real issues behind Jesse Jackson.

Louis Farhan was in Washington last Friday for a lecture at the University of the District of Columbia.

And his goons beat up a lot of the few protesters brave enough

to show up during the speeches by Farhan and other Marxist type people.

Jesse Jackson was singled out for praise and the jubilation

in the auditorium, from what I understand,

was electrifying and quite sobering.

But Jackson up to now has been treated with kid gloves.

Chris complains that there wasn’t much coverage.

Actually, there can’t be a lot of coverage of Jackson.

Otherwise, we’ll have a situation similar to what

exists in New York right now, with the Brawley case.

You just can’t confront it.

Chris Hitchens, let me ask you about the cover of Time magazine this week.

Here’s another man that everybody will recognize.

A word that’s back, a phrase that’s back, the big mole.

What do you think of George Bush?

Incredibly little.

I mean, he seems to have–

it seems evident even to his own supporters that he has no principles and can be filled up

with whatever stance or position may seem appropriate to the latest polling figures.

He’s been a gross and persistent liar about his part in the Iran-Contra scandal.

And I think that now that the field has narrowed to him and the absurd Rather flap has died away,

people will start asking what was in that memo that Rather was trying to ask about, rather than how well Bush did in avoiding the question.

Questions are going to keep coming up.

I think the coincidence of Bush’s nearing the nomination at about the time

that Lawrence Walsh nears his conclusions is going to prove very exciting.

And we may finally see a little justice done to the administration’s perpetrators.

Loni?

Well, the fact that the Christopher Hitchens of this world think incredibly

little of George Bush, I think is something Bush should be happy about.

People have consistently underestimated him throughout this campaign.

From the early days, he was belittled by the press, by the intelligentsia.

As a man who stands for nothing, who has no principles.

The only weakness I can detect so far is that Bush does not project well on television privately.

He’s a most engaging man, a very decent man.

And anyone you talk to will tell you that.

He’s a very principled man in that he’s a very civilized, decent man, which again in politics is somewhat of a rarity.

And as far as Iran-Contra goes, it’s very curious that people never brought up Bush’s role in it until he became a major candidate.

That’s absolutely untrue.

That’s absolutely untrue.

If you didn’t read what everyone was trying to say about him, it was only because it was a very conformist press at the time.

But the idea that one has waited to make this point because he’s near the nomination is completely false.

I remember writing about it at the time of that memo

with Amir Amr in Jerusalem.

It’s only shows quite definitely.

The Vice President has to be loyal to his president and can’t be held responsible for what is the president’s

responsibility and the Lawrence Welsh inquisition because he can’t call it a really independent investigation.

It’s an almost astounding thing what is happening with the special prosecutor phenomena in this country.

Let me just show the audience on your cover for March, the American Spectator.

You have a cover story right here written by Charlotte Lowe, I believe, of the Washington Times.

Insight magazine.

Of Insight magazine, excuse me.

You go ahead.

I didn’t mean to interrupt.

I’m going to show the audience that they could read more about this.

OK.

Well, I mean, one of the points Ms.

Lowe makes is that Walsh has been given an incredible kind of free hand, a huge staff, an unlimited budget, one case to pursue.

And he’s been pursuing it for well over a year now,

it seems, in a most inquisitorial way.

I mean, everything is suspect.

And he can almost subpoena whatever piece of paper is his fancy.

He has no time pressures other than political time pressures.

He has no other cases to worry about.

This is clearly exceptional in the way prosecutors work in this country.

They have other cases to worry about.

They have to choose and decide how to limit their resources and their time.

Walsh has just given carte blanche.

Let me show the audience the front page of the Washington Post today.

And lack of witnesses documents troubles Walsh’s Iran inquiry.

Did you have a chance to read this page?

What was your reaction to that?

Well, we know what happened to the documents.

We know that they were shredded.

We know they were shredded probably with the compliance, certainly with the, what shall we say,

silent complicity of the attorney general.

You see, it’s having an attorney general who can’t be suspicious of anybody that necessitates having a special prosecutor.

But this has become– This is a political issue, not a legal issue.

I didn’t interrupt you once.

Well, please–

Not to say nothing of the fact that the attorney general himself necessitates two or three special prosecutors for his own activities.

The fact that he refuses to bring the mentality of an investigator or a cop or a justice department

official at all to the signs of high crime and misdemeanor in high places means you’ve got

to have special prosecutors to fill the vacancy left by an attorney general of that type.

Would you be in favor of a special prosecutor to investigate Speaker Jim Wright?

Yes, I would, sure.

Yeah.

But who would–

I mean, it seems to me at any rate.

What I’ve heard that the– But as the special prosecutor law now exists, it’s a creation of Congress.

It used exclusively to go after the executive branch.

Congress is exempt from special prosecution.

And so it’s clearly a mechanism for settling political scores,

scores which should be settled at the ballot box and not in the courts.

Yeah, but it seems to worry you more than the evidence of criminal activity in the administration worries you.

I mean, which is what I would expect from the American spectator, which– Which the communist cause is not a criminal activity.

Well, you mean nothing done in that cause could be criminal.

Is that what you meant to say?

Well, I mean, I’m not going to be that absolutist.

But it seems that what causes people most upset is not really the wrong connection, but simply the fact that money was being

sent to the contrast privately.

Could I jump in here?

And we’ll get back to this, I’m sure, as the hour goes on or the 90 minutes goes on.

But I want to ask you about another thing that popped up over the weekend.

And not just the weekend, but it seems to track through the last 48 hours.

First, let’s start because we’re talking about the Iran-Contra thing with the Western whispers right up here in this corner.

And this is in US News.

This Bud’s for Nixon.

Before Robert “Bud” MacFarlane pleaded guilty last week in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, he visited Richard Nixon, who agreed

that MacFarlane should strike a deal to be sentenced before he had to testify against his old colleagues.

I’m going to drop this and show you The New York Times for Monday.

And this is another story by Steven Engelberg.

MacFarlane’s struggle with himself and the special prosecutor right down here, they have lifted a quote.

Nixon describes MacFarlane’s situation as tragic.

And many people who know Mr.

MacFarlane express sympathy for him.

Mr. Nixon, for instance, said in an interview, I’ve known Bud MacFarlane going back on 20 years.

It’s tragic for him and for the nation that he had to go through this ordeal.

One other thing, and it’s Richard Nixon related.

In The New York Times yesterday, the front page here

is of The New York Times magazine,

Dealing with Gorbachev by Richard Nixon.

And it’s an article from a forthcoming book that he’s about to publish.

He’s about to make a speech in New York that’s open to cameras.

Overall, general reaction to why Richard Nixon all of a sudden is being quoted everywhere?

Well, because all of a sudden he looks good by comparison, I imagine, because this

administration has managed to surpass the level of malfeasance that he attained.

And also because this is a very forgiving and sentimental culture.

I don’t think it’s the question of the culture being forgiving.

Rather, it’s the press, which loves to destroy and then build up again in order to destroy at a later date.

Nixon, of course, is quoted widely because he has something to say.

He’s one of the most astute politicians of our century.

He continues to follow everything very closely.

And he has something to contribute.

Most politicians nowadays do not.

He does.

I think that the price for having him back and rehabilitated, which is what seems to be happening,

ought to be that he removes the lock that he maintains personally on a whole

section of the Presidential Archives of his period and opens those to historians.

Sees to contest that in the courts.

Let me add one– And gives an honest interview about the motive for the Watergate burglary.

But then I think things could be put on a fair footing again.

This is the Wall Street Journal for Monday.

It’s David Shribman’s piece about Bob Dole, how Dole squandered money, opportunities, dooming hopes for ’88.

And it leads off here.

As Robert Dole watched each of the 17 Super Tuesday political contests slip

from his grip last Tuesday evening, a telegram arrived at his third floor suite.

Richard Nixon was urging him to fight on.

Any reaction?

Well, Nixon still wants to see a race.

Nixon may think that if Bush wins early on,

it’s bad for the Republican Party and that it won’t force Bush to sharpen his views, to display

more leadership, to develop sounder reasons for describing why he wants to be president.

I mean, that’s the main question about Bush so far.

No one really knows why it is he wants to be president other than perhaps out of a sense of duty.

Chris?

Sense of duty.

No, I think that’s right.

Actually, I think Nixon does want there to be a race.

And for as long as there’s a race, ex-presidents and ex-leaders of the Republican Party are in demand as advisors and consultants.

Speaking of a race, here is the front page of The Washington Times.

And the headline on this story, Home Folks in Tennessee Vouch for Gore’s Roots.

And you can see here, this is Carthage, Tennessee.

And here are two people.

This is a beauty shop.

You can see a picture of them.

Reaction from both of you to Senator Gore.

I think he’s the least qualified of all the Democratic candidates.

He’s not even– still wet behind the ears, as they say.

He’s almost an invention of the new republics.

He’s waffled on issues probably as much as Gephardt and gotten away with it.

And just personally, he does not seem

to project a charismatic sound leader.

He’s sort of– I mean, I think Chris Hitchens would probably have a field day describing Gore’s kind of little rich boy image.

Well, I feel a bit pompous calling him wet behind the ears since he’s about the same age as I am.

But I think I agree with what you say about him being candidate of the new republic, which I think is a deplorable thing to have to be.

I also think that it’s one thing to notice as a politician that there’s

some space on the right, as there is in the Democratic race at the moment.

But then to move to occupy it by pretending to hold positions you never held until you

noticed that space is contemptible and probably can be seen through even by people who

are going to be impressed by the other half of his argument, which is this firm

belief that he comes from Tennessee, which is something that I don’t deny him.

If he wants to claim that, he’s welcome.

Why– Why is there such a big effort made to sort of prove and establish this is something that I don’t understand.

Why do the polls out of Chicago show that he’s got about 3% of the vote going into the primary?

Because that reflects his popularity in the North.

And Mr. Hitchens doesn’t understand

why Gore is trying to establish a southern– an image of himself as a southerner.

And that’s simply because the South for the Democrats is very critical.

Without winning the South, they can’t win the presidency.

And he needs a gimmick, something that will separate him from the rest of the pack.

So he wants to run as a southerner.

It’s very understandable.

But again, in the North, he has no real support.

He has no name recognition.

He’s very young.

He may be running for future races.

He wants to establish himself now as a national figure.

And maybe in four or eight years, he’ll be a little more qualified.

In the commentary section of The Washington Times this morning, Pat Buchanan writes a column that’s nationally syndicated.

And the headline is, “Should the Right Take a Walk?

” Let me read this paragraph right here.

“Frustrated, bitter at their failure

to unite and stop the moderates recapture of the party, conservatives are muttering.

Let’s sit this one out.

Let’s let the Democrats have it all.

When they foul up, as they did under President Carter, we will come back stronger than ever in ’90 and ’92, maybe even taking the House.

Let’s let Michael Dukakis’s crowd

be lollygagging in the barnyard when the chickens come home to roost.

”

I can see why the Right is talking like that.

By the way, Pat Buchanan says, “While not inaccurate as cold-blooded analysis, the sentiment is more than a little cynical.

This would be true dog in the manger politics, Nelson Rockefeller style, and the stakes are too large for such pettiness now.

” That’s boilerplate, of course.

I mean, the meat of the pieces is in the suggestion that the Republicans have

no further claim on the loyalty of the movement right, which is probably true.

But I mean, it’s hard to be sympathetic to them.

They were the last significant political group in the country to notice what was

obvious to the rest of us from the start, which is that Ronald Reagan is a fraud.

And now they realize that he didn’t mean a word he really said, that he let down

even his dearest friends, broke every promise he’d made even in that quarter.

And they’re sort of appalled and hurt and upset.

And I just think it’s delightful.

Well, to call Ronald Reagan a fraud is, again, something we all like to hear from people like Christopher Hitchens.

I mean, would that all Republican frauds had two consecutive, on the

whole, highly successful terms in which the president is extremely popular.

And thanks to that popularity, his vice president emerges as the front runner for the Republican nomination.

His policies in the larger sense have been very successful.

This is one reason why conservatives like Jack Kemp haven’t been able to make a bigger impact on the race.

Paul Jagoe pointed this out in Wall Street Journal last Friday.

Very good point.

That a lot of what the conservatives wanted, Reagan implemented.

And so the question now for conservatives is, where do we go from here?

Defeatism, such as the item quoted by Buchanan, isn’t the answer.

Conservatives have to mature politically.

And I think they will.

I don’t think they can do that.

I mean, that’s asking a lot.

Here’s the nation.

Here’s what it looks like in the March 5 issue.

And I want to open it up and look at Christopher Hitchens column right here.

I just want to read you and get Vlady to respond to what Mr.

Hitchens says.

“A continuing fame in the tenure of Ronald Reagan, the president of laughter

and forgetting, has been the steady politicization of the Justice Department.

” What do you think of the reference to the president of the United States as a president of laughter and forgetting?

Well, obviously, Mr. Hitchens is clever in picking up

on the movie based on a Kundra novel.

But I think I’d rather read Mr. Hitchens when he describes his trips to Havana in conversations with Castro and other Cubans.

He seems to be more at home in pieces like that.

That’s feeble even by the standards of the American spectator.

Never had a conversation with Castro.

Recently wrote a report from Cuba, from the Havana Film Festival, as a matter of fact, about the

failure of the Cuban Communist Party to live up to the reports of glasnost in the Soviet Union.

So your remark is ignorant as well as an attempt at a slur.

On the politicization of the Justice Department,

I would only add that I see yesterday Mr.

Meciot again doesn’t think he should step down.

And I don’t know when– I don’t know if it’s possible to ask the question in this way–

when he would ever admit to the idea of a conflict of interest.

I don’t know.

It’s so far proved impossible to show him convincingly what the idea means.

There’s no evidence that he understands it.

I think it’s actually a very serious thing.

That’s why I wrote that column, that the Justice Department is presided over by

a man who has so many friends who are on the take, all of whose business dealings

appear to be questionable, and none of whose statements on the central political scandal of this administration

have turned out to be true, but had a certain marginal utility in allowing the perpetrators to get away to cover their tracks.

I mean, this is a very serious thing to have an attorney general who’s probably a crook.

Probably a crook.

That’s sort of been the view of Mies from day one, ever since he came to the administration, and then to the Justice Department.

And it emanates from people who are simply completely opposed to the Reagan view of the judiciary, of the Constitution,

of the role of the courts.

And so since the opposition cannot discuss these issues on their merit, they prefer to go after Mies

under alleged corruption, which simply doesn’t stand up.

These Washington Post stories, day after day, based on nothing new.

They’re just trying to keep the issue alive.

We’re going to go to the phones in about five minutes.

The numbers have been on the screen.

As a matter of fact, all eight lines are already lighted.

So if you’re getting a busy signal, that’s the reason.

You mentioned going to the– were you in Havana?

What was the name of the– It’s the Latin American Film Festival.

–Film Festival.

What do you think– this is Newsweek, and the cover story on Jesse Jackson.

What do you think when they publish photographs like that?

Of Jackson with Castro?

Yeah.

Why not?

Does it hurt him?

Does it help him?

Does it matter?

I think– well, I don’t think it’s designed in that case to hurt him.

He can’t have gone there at all.

It should be hurt.

He certainly knew the photograph was being taken.

It will only look damaging to people who don’t think it’s incredible that there isn’t an American ambassador in Havana.

There’s an American ambassador in Moscow.

There’s an American ambassador in Czechoslovakia.

There’s an American ambassador in Peking.

It’s absurd and abnormal.

There isn’t one in Havana.

This shouldn’t really have to be exciting.

I’m sure that we would have an ambassador in Havana if Mr.

Castro had gone with us a little more on peace in our hemisphere.

But since Castro tends to support revolutionary movements that are out to set up

Soviet bases in our hemisphere, since he’s running drugs or having very close contact with drug runners,

since he oppresses his own people, jails them, beats them, kills them,

it’s a bit odd to speak of them as just anybody, any other politician.

Here’s the cover of US News and World Report and the covers about a book by Steve Emerson, Secret Warriors,

Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era.

But inside, I want to get your quick comment before we go to the phones.

Here’s a picture of a photograph of Vice President George Bush.

And this magazine’s suggestion will be

in who will be in his cabinet.

And I want to get Christopher Hitchens reaction to this.

Let’s go quickly down the page.

At State, it would be James Baker, Nick Brady,

former senator at Treasury.

Defense would be John Tower.

This is the magazine’s guest.

Staff would be Craig Fuller, who’s on his staff now, and Richard Darman, who used to be at the Treasury Department at OMB.

Your reaction?

That’s the sort of thing that makes Pat Buchanan go

into a decline and start to have a baby.

I mean, as in the article you quoted before, it’s a sort of nightmare for the Republican right,

all these sort of tightly buttoned moderates.

I’m interested to see Craig Fuller, because he’s the man whose name is

on the memo that may hang Bush and prevent him from becoming president.

Your reaction?

Well, again, guess as to who will be staffing Bush’s cabinet

and administration.

Naturally, I think it will veer toward people who are rather established in Washington

and have a more moderate persuasion.

But again, it doesn’t mean conservatives have to despair.

People like Darman came around quite a bit while he was in the administration,

and there’s no reason to think that others may not as well.

The right has to remain articulate, vocal, and confident.

And I think then conservatives will have a voice.

Here’s a photograph of the governor of Massachusetts, and I want to get your quick

reaction to what kind of a president this man would be before we grab our first call.

He would make Bush look like a lost opportunity.

He has– he’s completely ignorant on foreign policy.

He’s been the benefactor of his predecessor’s economic policies in his own state.

I mean, he walked into a thriving economy,

and he’s now trying to profit from that politically.

It’s helped him financially.

He made a killing in raising money in Massachusetts, which is one reason why he’s doing so well, because he’s simply very well financed.

Chris Hitchens?

I don’t think he’s ignorant on foreign policy.

He’s one of the few candidates ever to have worked abroad or to speak another language apart from English.

I think he also does speak Greek, so that makes three.

On Central America, he has the, I think,

the soundest policy of all the candidates.

He correctly describes the Reagan administration’s intervention.

There is illegal as well as disastrous.

And it says it would stop.

And when he was governor of Massachusetts, he pardoned Sacco and Vanzetti.

Let’s grab a call.

Columbus, Georgia.

Go ahead, please.

Yes, I’ve got a comment for you.

Just wearing the glasses, the reference to Jesse Jackson, the negative comment

he made about him, reference to Jackson taking a picture with Fidel Castro.

Go right ahead, sir.

Well, I’d like– my question to him is– excuse me– what is the difference between

Jesse Jackson taking a photo with Castro and Ronald Reagan shaking hands with Gorbachev?

Don’t both countries have the same policy as far as how they are depressing their own people?

Thank you, sir.

No, President Reagan was meeting with Mr.

Gorbachev as part of official US policy.

It was a summit meeting.

Fidel Castro met with–

Jesse Jackson traveled to Fidel Castro as a private citizen.

He was expressing his personal preference for Castro.

It’s not the same thing at all.

Lottie Plasinski is originally from Santa Barbara, California.

We go next to Seattle, Washington.

Good morning.

First of all, Brian, I want to say that I got cut off twice last week.

Well, if you got cut off, were you on the show at all?

Well, yeah, but then just before I was ready to get on, I got cut off.

And then I called back Wednesday after– because I’d been to the caucus.

And he told me to call back on the Super Tuesday number.

And I told him I couldn’t get back– probably couldn’t get back on, which is exactly what happened.

OK, why don’t you go ahead then to make a point this morning?

OK, well, first of all, I want to tell Christopher Hitch, and I renewed my subscription to the nation.

But anyway, I’m going as a delegate for Gorbachev, regardless of what Christopher Hitch thinks.

And if he doesn’t make it, I’ll go for Jackson, because I cannot vote for Michael Dukakis.

Why is that caller?

Well, I think he’s pompous and arrogant.

And I think there’s a certain amount of harassment by his people at the caucuses.

And I heard that from other precincts also.

In other words, they implied to me that if Gore didn’t get enough, that I’d have to go

with Dukakis and different things like that, I mean, especially with the older citizens.

But I won’t vote in this election if he gets nominated, I’m sorry to say.

And that’ll be the first vote I haven’t cast since I cast my vote for Harry Truman.

All right, thank you.

Chris Hitchens?

Well, I must say I’m surprised.

Dukakis doesn’t normally arouse strong anti-emotions of that sort.

His problem, I think, is that he doesn’t arouse enough emotion in the first place.

Canton, Ohio.

Good morning.

Thanks, sir.

I’m a C-SPAN nut.

My question is to Mr. Brzezinski.

When he made this statement that Jesse Jackson being putting his arm around Castro, I wonder

if he feels that that is so much more than taking Bibles to Iran and selling them planes.

Also, if it’s worse still than dealing with all these countries and their drug

running, as does the president and this present administration, I’ll put it that way.

Lonnie?

I didn’t catch the last part of the question, but about the first, of course, it’s incredible that one should not sell guns to–

it’s contemptible that one should sell guns to Iran.

But again, this has nothing to do with Castro and Jackson.

Jackson traveled to Fidel Castro because he admires Fidel Castro.

He likes Fidel Castro’s political style, and that’s the kind of style he’d like to impose on the rest of us.

I hope Americans are smart enough to realize that.

Los Cruces, New Mexico.

Go ahead, please.

Good morning.

Good morning, Brian.

Morning.

I have a statement to make, a short one, about Nixon.

It wasn’t what he did.

It’s how he did it.

And he set a precedent that no American ever knew about before.

He almost destroyed everything, especially the young people.

They say, let the hell the president get by with it.

So can I.

Now, here’s my theory on the Democratic convention.

There will be no candidate, and they will draft Mario Cuomo.

The other candidates will have power with their electoral vote, with their votes, their delegates.

And Jesse Jackson will be given the highest job in the cabinet possible.

And the rest of them will be used too.

But the Democrats want to win this election, and they can.

And I’m sure they’re hoping that Bush gets it, because I agree with Hitchens that it’s the hope

of the Democratic Party to run against a Texan like Bush, because they can cut him to ribbons.

All right, thank you.

The photos you were seeing is from the New York Times on Sunday.

And I was going to ask the general question following on this gentleman’s call from Las Cruces.

Will one of these men here be the next president of the United States?

I think so, yes.

The one in the largest picture.

Chris?

I think that any one of the smaller pictures would be better than the large picture.

And I think that probably if Michael Dukakis can get locked up early enough and get over the squabble

and make an honorable agreement with Jesse Jackson, then as the Democrats were

saying the other day, if they can’t beat Bush, they should be in another country.

Any chance that the gentleman from Las Cruces is right about Mario Cuomo?

Not now.

I think people have stopped talking like that.

I mean, for one thing, what is so great about this man that he should be summoned in a time of crisis?

I mean, having contributed nothing to the campaign?

As a non-candidate, once he becomes a candidate, he’d look pretty feeble.

New York City, go ahead, please.

Yes, good morning, C-SPAN.

Morning.

My question is going to be from the gentleman from The Spectator.

But I’m from New York.

Mario Cuomo is basically a media creation.

The media, after they saw his extreme left wing speech at the Democratic National Convention,

where he blamed Ronald Reagan for murdering nuns in El Salvador, the news media went crazy.

They see him as their last chance to bring socialism back to America, and he’s not going to sell to the American people.

But my question is this.

In The New York Times yesterday, they did another one of their polls.

And in that poll, it showed that only 18% of the American people now have faith in the national news media.

And of course, that’s because most of the news media holds the same views as the fellow from the nation there on the left.

And people are beginning to see through, and have seen through for many

years now, that the national news media really is not a news organization.

It’s a left wing activist group that’s trying to change America.

Now my question to the fellow from The Spectator is this.

Why do the conservatives continue to lay back on these issues?

Robert Bork, for instance, was on C-SPAN yesterday.

He pointed out point by point the smears and the lies that were allowed to go over

the news media, never challenged, that knocked him out of the box of Supreme Court.

The story of CISPA, when the national news media did the story on the Committee in Solidarity

with the People of El Salvador, it was never pointed out that this was a communist front group.

It’s never pointed out that Jesse Jackson is backed by the Communist Party, Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA.

Now we know that the news media is going to continue to cover up these sins of the left.

But why doesn’t the conservative movement, the conservative press in this

country, which I know is small, but why don’t they expose these things?

– Connor, let me ask you, how do you know that the Communist Party backs Jesse Jackson?

– Well, because it has been reported in, for instance, the New York City Tribune, which is a conservative newspaper.

And the New York Post had an article on it a while ago.

– OK, let me ask you a technical question.

Do you blame Jesse Jackson for that, or do you blame the Communist Party?

In other words, who’s to blame for somebody supporting you?

– Well, I’m going to tell you something funny.

I happen to think what’s happening with Jesse Jackson on one level is a tremendous thing,

because I believe that most of the blacks that support Jesse Jackson are doing so out of pride.

And I think that’s altogether good, because just like the Irish or anybody else, or even the

Greeks are backing Michael Dukakis, there’s a kind of ethnic pride, which I believe is healthy.

So on the one level, it’s good.

On the other level, it’s very sad that Jesse Jackson really shares the same type of views of Fidel Castro, which he does.

If you listen to Jesse Jackson’s rhetoric when he talks about economic violence and economic justice, he’s talking about justice to him

would be to take money from people who produce money and give it to the guy

that dirty’s up your windshield when you come out of the Lincoln Tunnel.

– All right, thank you.

Mr. Ploshenski?

– Well, I mean, the caller sort of addressed

some of the basic issues in American public life.

There clearly is in the media a kind of left liberal bias.

I won’t go all the way and say it’s completely communist or Marxist.

But it’s just in our culture, it’s

not nice to be too anti-communist,

too radically anti-communist.

It’s just a bad tone.

And so you just don’t do it.

– Chris?

– Well, what can you say?

His editor, Emmett Tyrrell, has a column

in the Washington Post, which no one of my political opinions does.

There isn’t a single syndicated columnist in the country, actually, who calls himself a socialist.

– You call yourself a socialist?

– Yes, yes I do.

Now the other day– – Nat Henry?

– No, he’s– no, liberals.

The other day in the Washington Post op-ed page, I read the column by Tyrrell on the same page

as a column by William Buckley, Norman Paul Horrott’s Jean Cote-Poucher, I think

there was Mike Kinsley who said against that, who’s a mild neoliberal figure.

I think it’s just simply prima facie evidence of paranoia if people believe that the press is a leftist organization in this country.

The callers’ other points were of the same kind.

The idea that I heard Mario Cuomo speak to the Democratic convention, nobody could say that it was extreme left.

If it did say, which I don’t remember it saying, that the Reagan administration was

responsible for the murder of the nuns in El Salvador, then it was factually correct.

Because not only did the Reagan administration

pay the people who did that, but it also protected and defended

them and explained their crime away,

something that should never be forgotten what happened to Sister Jean Donovan and her friends.

It’s good that you remind us.

Gus Hall and Angela Davis run their own campaign.

As anyone who knows anything about the Communist Party knows, they have their own presidential candidates.

But insofar as endorsement goes, the Communist Party

endorsed Lyndon Johnson in 1964 over Goldwater and didn’t– – And I’m sure Johnson– – Didn’t really seem to make a big deal of difference.

– –endorsement.

But as Jesse Jackson rejected this endorsement,

and the distance is all from the– – Well, Jesse Jackson hasn’t gotten

the endorsement because the Communist Party is running its own candidate.

– After taking this call, I want to look at the Washington– – Look, they said they would support him if he were the nominee.

– I want to look at the Washington Post editorial op-ed page this morning and get you both to react to the positions of the writers.

Go to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Go ahead, please.

– Yes.

I want to say I agree with the woman who is calling from Seattle.

She’s a Gore supporter and dislikes Dukakis.

I’ll have a hard time.

If he’s the nominee, I’m going to have a hard time voting for him.

And I’ll tell you why.

I went out to protest the Bork nomination.

I probably risked my life protesting the Bork nomination.

I was harassed and everything else.

I’m a very respectable looking woman and so forth.

But I was harassed.

I was– I was– it was really rough, my friends and I.

And Dukakis was perfectly happy for Bork– for the Bork nomination to be defeated.

– How do you know?

– And he says that he didn’t know anything about what his campaign manager was doing.

And to– all of a sudden, when there was a risk of the Biden nomination going through–

this is all kind of complicated, but I know that Hitchens remembers this– that when there was a risk that Biden

might have national exposure on television for a week, then Dukakis was perfect– was perfectly happy to strike down Biden,

even though the weakness of Biden could have meant that the Bork nomination went through.

– Who are you supporting, Paula?

– What?

– Who are you supporting?

– I am– I agree with the woman from Seattle.

I think that Gore would have a good chance of being elected.

And I think he’s had a good, consistent record in support of working men and women.

And I’ve checked his record.

– OK, thank you.

Who wants to react?

– No, me.

– I’ll leave it at Stan.

– Yeah, it’s fine.

It’s fine as it is.

– Let’s go to the– this is the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Let’s start up here in the corner.

We’ll quickly go through it and get your reaction.

Meg Greenfield, what’s her politics?

Anybody jump in.

– Well, I would say she was a sort of orthodox liberal.

– You agree with that, Lonnie?

– I’d say she’s kind of almost neoconservative, but afraid to admit it.

– All right.

– Yeah, that’s what I said.

– Here’s Jean Kirkpatrick.

Quickly?

– Historical reactionary.

– No, stalwart neoconservative and patriot.

– Robert Evans and–

Roland Evans and Robert Novak.

– Comical reactionary.

– Our best political reporter– – Clown reaction.

– The best political reporting in the country.

– We’ve got one more up here in the right hand corner, William Raspberry.

– Mush head.

– Mush head?

Why do you say that?

– Just– I mean, just look at the– – Because he’s not for Jesse Jackson, uncritically.

He’s a moderate.

Just sound.

– OK, and how would you describe that op-ed page for Monday, then?

Is the caller right?

– The op-ed page for Monday is a sort of salad of– salad of conventional wisdom.

– That’s the old canard.

I mean, the op-ed piece is not the rest of the paper.

This is a section where opinions are expressed.

But this has nothing to do with the opinions expressed in alleged news reporting.

And that’s– – Alleged news?

You’re saying that the news reporting is biased?

– Well, yeah.

The story can be frequently slanted.

I mean, for instance, the nonstop stories on Edward Meese, Edwin Meese and his supposed corruption.

I mean, it just never ends.

There’s nothing new in these stories, but it keeps going on and on.

– San Antonio, you’re next.

– Yes, I would like to ask Mr. Plasinski.

First of all, he seems to have a negative slant towards Jesse Jackson.

And I would just like to know where he gets his information

as far as where Mr. Jackson stands with the Communist

Party or with Fidel Castro, why he has such a negative slant to that.

It seems to me that this is a good opportunity for the United States to open up to other parts of the world.

And I’d just like to see what his– – Well, there’s probably no country more open to other parts of the world than the United States.

We have freedom to travel, and anyone

can go anywhere he pleases.

But again, the point about Jesse Jackson– well, you weren’t there.

You’re back here.

The point about Jesse Jackson is he traveled to Cuba not to improve relations with Castro,

but simply because he admires Castro and the political style Castro represents.

– You’ve said that three times.

I’m not going to let it go the third time.

Jesse Jackson went down there to try and broker a prisoner exchange with Castro, which was partially successful

and has paved the way for the American interest

section in Havana to do a general deal on human rights and Cuban prisoners in US jails.

Jackson has nothing to apologize for on that trip.

And a lot of people are better off directly that he may do.

– Let me show the audience what Newsweek suggests

would be a shadow cabinet for Jesse Jackson.

And we can go through it quickly, and I’ll take a call and come back and ask your reaction.

Here’s Burt Lance, Drew Days III, a former assistant attorney general, Felix Rolton, a financier from New York City,

Jimmy Carter, former president.

Down here is a group of Tony Anaya, former governor of New Mexico, Pat Schroeder, William Gray, and the Speaker of the House, Jim Wright.

Let’s take a call, and we’ll come back and ask you about this.

San Jose, California, you’re next.

– Good morning.

I was wondering why is it not better well known that General Secord was the ranking officer that designed Desert One in 1980?

You remember the rescue in the desert with the helicopters?

And number two, particularly Mr. Hitchens maybe would know about this.

Do you think that the talk of Iran, gate, and Desert One kind of makes the small

group that votes Republican in primaries circle the wagons and unite with Bush?

But in the general election, it would alienate most of the electorate.

And secondarily, if you have time, would you find Senator Gore and Governor Dukakis both acceptable?

I have a feeling that Gore might be a stronger candidate and equally as good a president.

Let’s see if he can handle those.

– OK, well, on the first, on the Secord and Desert One, I mean, it’s good that you

recollect the very early connection between the Reagan team and the affair in Iran.

What I hope will happen when Mr. McFarlane comes to trial

is that he has asked what he was doing when he met with two other envoys of then-Governor Reagan

in October 1980 and the envoys of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and that he’s asked what they discussed,

and that he’s asked why it was that arms started going

from Washington to Tehran very shortly after the president was inaugurated when there

were no hostages in Tehran and no hostages in Beirut and no moderates in Tehran either.

In short, what we want cleared up is whether or not the deal with Iran was made when Carter was still president,

and it was a deal to keep the American hostages in Tehran in exchange

for arms from Reagan if, as a consequence of that, Carter was defeated.

So yes, good point.

I’ve written four columns about that.

The apparent liberal and left-dominated media haven’t seen fit yet to ask any of these questions,

but they will get asked because everything I just said is factually true.

– Well, as our media becomes more and more conspiratorial, they will probably come around to these questions.

– Well, if it’s a conspiracy, which is the word you use to try and negate it, it must

be the conspiracy, surely, of those who met secretly with the envoys of the Ayatollah.

What do you think they were talking about in October 1980?

Why didn’t they report their meeting to the State Department?

And why do you think they started selling arms as soon as Reagan was elected in 1981?

Why is that?

Don’t you think this is the prima facie case for an under-the-table deal with Iran?

– I’ve seen no evidence to back up what you’re saying.

And secondly, whatever context the Reagan administration had with Iran had to do with larger geopolitical realities.

– Wasn’t the administration content?

– Meaning the future of Iran, a large strategically critical neighbor of the Soviet Union.

If that area falls into Soviet control,

it’s a major defeat to the West and its interests.

– Now, you just said that Jesse Jackson had no right to meet as a private citizen with Fidel Castro.

I don’t think that’s true.

But if you think that that’s a distinction,

then the fact is that Macfarlane, Silberman,

and Richard Allen met as envoys of the Reagan election campaign in 1980 with the Ayatollah.

– I mean, we got a call to take.

And I want to make sure our audience knows who our special guests are this morning.

Our guest here on the left is we– on your right, but on our left here, is the managing

editor of the American Spectator, Vladislav Plasinski, who has been with the magazine

since 1980, has also written for the National Review and the Wall Street Journal,

has a BA in history, University of California at Santa Barbara, did graduate work in Soviet

area studies at Indiana University, and is originally from Santa Barbara, California.

Christopher Hitchens, a columnist with the nation, has been with the nation since 1978 here in Washington

since ’81, previously was the foreign editor of the New Statesman, a publication published in Britain.

Background includes a graduate in philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University,

is originally from Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, says he calls himself a Navy brat.

Buffalo, New York, go ahead, please.

Hello, I’m responding to these two ladies who are very irate because they felt they

had been intimidated in the caucuses in favor of Michael Dukakis.

That’s not the fault of him.

That’s the fault of the caucus system itself.

Because in watching it in overseas span, what you have to do is to get 15% of the vote

in that particular caucus, or else your candidate doesn’t have any recognition at all.

And what happens is the rest of the candidates go around and try to persuade

those people to go on their side, perhaps in that particular caucus.

The Dukakis candidate was very persuasive, and this person having been

totally committed to Gore or whoever it was, was very incensed, as I would be.

And I think that something ought to be done about the caucus system so that

it would not antagonize somebody against a person like Michael Dukakis.

I’m for Michael Dukakis.

I know he doesn’t come across very strong.

I mean, he seems to be less impassioned than other people.

But give me a person who’s got ice water in his veins rather than someone who can stand up and make an impassioned speech.

And in the long run, what they’re going to do is they’re going to trot out the families of people.

And whoever has a nice son or a nice daughter is going to get a few more votes.

So in the long run, I like John Dukakis.

And if all fails, I think that Kitty Dukakis’ father is a national treasure.

All they have to do is trot him out, and he’s going to get lots and lots of votes.

OK, thank you.

Who wants to react?

Well, I don’t think the college should be that upset with the caucus system.

Politics is politics.

And there’s a lot of hardball, so-called, being played.

If you want to look at Dukakis and find something to alienate you, just look at Jim Sasso or Susan Estridge.

I mean, these are very contentious, to put it mildly.

You mean John Sasso?

John Sasso, I’m sorry.

Who was ousted as his campaign director after he did in Biden?

And how would you describe those two people?

Well, as extremely hardball–

extremely tough and ruthless political operatives.

Chris, any reaction?

Thousand Oaks, California.

Go ahead, please.

Yes, I have a question for Mr. Hitchens there.

I don’t know where the gentleman comes from.

I’ve never even heard of him until I’ve sat here this morning watching C-SPAN.

And I can see exactly what a liberal that he is and how strong and what he is probably trying for the third party also.

So you know how to hurt a guy.

As far as Jesse Jackson, I’d like him to tell me, where does Jesse Jackson get his money to go in a campaign?

Who backs him up completely?

How come he goes and disposes him in any way?

They are afraid to go into his background and bring out anything in regards to his background whatsoever political-wise.

Well, first– We’ll never have a better president– Excuse me.

–than Ronald Reagan here in the United States.

And if he doesn’t like the United States, why is he over here and trying to ruin it?

OK, thank you.

Well, you’re more insulting than you intend to be, madam, by calling me a liberal.

I said earlier, I was a socialist.

You can’t have been listening.

We regard liberals as dangerous compromises where I come from.

You’re also the first questioner I’ve come across who thinks Jackson has too much money in his campaign.

It’s really appalling, I think, that every political article that you read describes campaigns in terms of how much money they can raise,

how much money they have behind them, describes a failing campaign as cash poor, as if that was crime in itself.

The Jackson campaign is notoriously the one with the least money.

So where it comes from is from individual donations for the most part.

He hasn’t got any backing of major capital.

I mean, it would, of course, be his right to raise a lot more money, wouldn’t you say?

Well, I mean, one way Jesse raises money is to shake down McDonald’s managers in certain areas.

The Republic reported this a few weeks ago.

He also has collections in church for his campaign.

That’s all I’m thinking.

What will they think of next?

Fort Wayne, you’re next.

I’m calling.

And well, first I want to say I am not a racial person.

I am Republican, but I find it hard to vote for George Bush.

I certainly wouldn’t vote for Jesse Jackson.

He’s a blame-American-first candidate.

I have never heard a loyal word to this country come out of this man’s mouth.

He scares me to death.

He is for a third world.

And the press, of course, handles him with kid gloves, because if you say anything

and I work with the black, I volunteer with them, they are not like he is.

He scares me.

And I’m not racial.

But he does not appear to me to appreciate or like this country.

And neither does Chris Hutchins.

I think people are right.

We’re beginning to see through you.

We can’t get good candidates, because the press smears everybody.

Thank you.

See what Mr. Hutchins says about that.

No, I think it’s a perfectly good statement in its own terms.

I mean– No comment.

No.

No comment.

Yeah.

Here is– and the magazines are full of speculation this morning in US News.

They suggest these are possible vice presidential running

mates for George Bush, Lamar Alexander, Liddy Dole, Tom Kane, and Jack Kemp.

And I also might throw under the pot here for discussion quickly before we take our next call

that the Wall Street Journal front page piece this morning on Bob Dole includes in it a reference to the fact

that his advisors are chagrined that a plan that they had worked out was not carried through,

in which he would have announced before Super Tuesday that Lamar Alexander would have been his running mate had he been successful.

What’s your reaction to that?

Well, I think it’s a little early to speculate about vice presidents, vice presidential candidates.

I think one reason why there’s talk about this now is because, again, the press has to discuss–

find some new angle to discuss politically.

And so these speculations begin.

I’m reminded of 1976, I believe, when Ronald Reagan,

as a kind of last ditch move, named–

was it Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker,

I believe, as his vice presidential nominee.

This was an attempt to somehow broaden his base.

But in fact, it backfired.

It alarmed conservatives as a kind of ideological sellout.

And it didn’t work.

So I think any nominee who at this point decides to honor the vice presidential

nominee is simply trying to come up with a gimmick to save his own campaign.

Call me sentimental, if you will.

I hope that it goes to Kemp.

I think that he fought a very honorable campaign.

A campaign of ideas.

Very clean and interesting campaign.

I think deserved better from the press and the voters than he got.

And I think it would do honor to him if he was selected.

He’s obviously far too good to be running for a person of the caliber of Bush.

So he won’t get it.

This– I mean, if this comes true

and Kemp is the vice presidential nominee, then Bush will win very easily.

Ventura, California, as we look at USA Today on a Monday.

Go ahead, please.

Good morning, Brian and panelists.

Morning.

If I may, I’d like to touch on the candidacy of Jesse Jackson and pose a question.

It would appear the media is elected not to delve too deeply into the various flanks in the Jackson presidential platform.

For instance, they refer to Jackson as a liberal.

I think he’s in the same camp with one of your guests there today.

He’s more of a socialist than a liberal.

For instance, he has stated over and over, if elected, he would take money from the barracudas.

That’s a bit of rhetoric.

I know he’s toned down lately.

I guess he was scaring too many people.

But Jackson has promised his president he will take money from the corporations and spend it on the poor.

He further promises to cut the end of the defense maybe by 10% to 20% despite the fact it’s

been cut three years running to a point that some people are really concerned about it.

But disregarding the potential harm to our national security

is as certain as day follows night, a substantial cut in defense spending will cost upper and middle income individuals in defense

and defense-dependent companies probably in the neighborhood of a million jobs.

That may be a low estimate.

I don’t know.

I read somewhere recently that some 600,000 jobs have already been lost in defense over the past three years.

Now, I have a two-part question.

I’d appreciate if they get answered.

One, well, how will it take a million jobs from upper and middle income families

to create a million jobs for the unemployed and the low-income families?

How is that going to help the economy?

And two, and it’s perhaps a related question, do you feel that Jackson’s approach of taking money

from corporations, which I always understood from way back that corporations, they created jobs.

If you take that money and you spend the money on the poor who don’t

create jobs, is this a proven method of creating wealth for all the people?

Thank you, sir.

Chris Hitchens?

It’s an interesting question for its revelation of something that’s almost never discussed in this country, which

is military Keynesianism, the idea that military spending is basically an economic technique, a full employment

technique to bridge the gap between overproduction and underconsumption.

Interesting anyway that you think of it in that way.

If it was any other kind of program, you’d call it a boondoggle.

Truth is this.

I mean, Jackson is more of a populist than he is anything else.

And you’re right in saying that his rhetoric is against the fat cats and for the poor, and that some of that’s rather naive sounding.

Nonetheless, it’s true and deserves attention

that a lot of the Fortune 500 corporations haven’t paid any tax at all in the last eight years.

And many of them have been getting actually tax rebates.

And that’s now becoming well past the point where it can be tolerated.

And that it’s simply naive to say that they’re keeping that money in order to create jobs.

I think Jackson will have to improve upon popular rhetoric if he’s going to meet your objection all the same.

Well, it’d be difficult for him to improve on it and remain true to himself.

I mean, Jackson’s essential program

is redistributionism, which means create a kind of communist socialist economy, a command economy,

as we have in Eastern Europe, Soviet bloc, and elsewhere.

Economies that are just falling further and further behind the West.

And it’s relatively free economies

and are the major reason why today Mr.

Gorbachev is propounding glasnost and perestroika.

He needs Western aid, Western help to save his polluting economy.

Richmond, Kentucky.

Go ahead, please.

Hi, thank you.

C-SPAN is great.

And I’d like to make a point and maybe a question about what a joke our electoral process and our democracy is.

It’s said that media is too powerful.

And I’d like to suggest it’s powerful only by its negation.

Neither the national media nor the National League of Women voters are powerful enough

to talk the Democrats and Republicans into actually facing their third party challengers.

And in lieu of that, I would like to say also that I lost my vote in Kentucky because the Democratic and Republican adversaries

in the Kentucky General Assembly have passed two laws– strict ballot access, of course.

And also, they abolished my right in.

And I was denied the right to choose my vote for president in ’84.

And I’d like to ask what you all think about that.

And just to carry the analogy a little further, if I hadn’t had a libertarian to vote for for senator,

I would have been locked in the booth and told that I had to vote for a candidate

that I did not wish to, or I would have to leave the booth and not vote.

Could you have written vote in?

No, because they abolished the right in in Kentucky in ’84

at the same time that they moved our due date up for our ballot access petitions, which also disallowed us.

We turned in 7,000 of the 5,000 required.

And I’d just like to ask, the Democrats and Republicans assert that third parties are so insignificant.

Yet you say they have to play hardball.

Why do they have to play hardball in this way if third parties are so insignificant?

And when are they going to have to face the challengers in public forum on national debate?

Thank you very much.

Chris.

If the control of money over the electoral process isn’t reversed very soon, I think it will be calamitous for democracy.

I think you’d have to make three or four reforms immediately to have a chance of saving it.

Obviously, you have to have free television advertising equal time for candidates.

I think you’d also have to have a ban on commercial opinion polls during the electoral process.

From the time an election was called, it was held, it would be forbidden to have opinion polls.

And I think you’d have to have compulsory voting, as well as a ban on–

oh, sorry, a limit on campaign spending.

I mean, only then, I think, could the idea that the voter in the booth is sovereign, as opposed to, as you found yourself,

merely the object of a process of salesmanship be restored to democracy.

Without that, it’s more like a plebiscite than an election.

Can you vote in American elections?

No.

Still a British citizen?

Yeah.

Vlade?

Well, Mr. Hitchens’ call for reforms, I think, are part of the problem.

The more reforms we have, the more problems arise as a result. And I think what he’s advocating,

I think, would bring about elections East European style, in which you have mandated electoral procedures,

mandated by the government.

This is the government we’re supposed to be electing, and not one that is telling us how we should be voting.

So I think the fewer controls, the fewer regulations,

the fewer reforms we have, as far as voting is concerned, the better off we’ll be.

Vlade Plosinski is the managing editor

of this publication, which is called The American Spectator.

See it on your screen there in just a moment.

And our other special guest this morning is a columnist with The Nation magazine, which looks like this, at least in the March 5th edition.

The colors change from week to week.

And our next call comes from Los Angeles, California.

Go ahead, please.

OK.

Thank you.

I’m going to take two minutes of your time.

I’m coming from Iran.

And I know all the backgrounds of the American administration in Iran.

I’m going to just take two minutes and brief you all about it.

OK, make it about a minute.

OK.

Iranian ambassadors, through the Shah of Iran, spent $5 million– I mean,

donated $5 million for Gerald Ford for his campaign, which didn’t succeed.

Then, Carter administration wanted to put the Shah down.

That’s what people in Iran, they believe.

So they changed the regime to the Carter.

Very last minute, when Carter was going and Reagan was coming down, the Persian Iranian government,

the mullahs, they spent whole 24 hours discussing about the hostages because they

had to deal with Reagan to give it back on his very first minute in the office.

And then Reagan announced on 1986, in the summer of ’96, that Iran country is not a Iran government.

He’s not a hostage.

He’s not a terrorist government because they were dealing with Iran.

Carter, get to the point, please.

OK, when everybody in Iran– I mean, through the mullahs– they’re burning American flag, they’re shouting, “Down with America,”

Reagan is sending a plane full of arms, a piece of cake, and a Bible with his signature on it, and a pistol as a gift to mullahs.

What do you call it?

Is it a begging?

Is it a principle?

Well, they’re putting Reagan down in every street in Iran, and then he’s begging for them.

OK, I’m going to let him go and see if anybody wants to comment on anything he said.

Well, English isn’t the gentleman’s first language, but I think I saw the point he was trying to make.

I mean, there is a case for believing that the arms deal with Iran that we now know about

was a payoff for a deal we didn’t know about and that that deal was made to fix the 1980 election,

that it was a deal whereby if the ITOL had kept the American diplomatic hostages and denied a victory to Jimmy

Carter thereby, he would be rewarded with American weapons when Reagan was elected.

You think there’s a deal?

There’s a great deal of evidence that that did happen.

I can rehearse some of it again if you like.

Vellani?

No, again, I think this is just pure speculation and invention.

I mean, the ITOL releases hostages, the ITOL takes hostages.

And again, what the Reagan administration was doing was trying to get an opening there

in order to deal with Iran vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

That’s the major issue.

Akron, Ohio, go ahead, please.

Morning.

Morning.

I have two quick comments and then a question.

First, I’d like to ask C-SPAN to have more international reporters like

Christopher Hitchens because they don’t seem to be as tied down by American bias.

Second, one of your callers last week said she hunted and hunted and finally got the popular vote

of Super Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, which indicated a two to one vote of Democrats to Republicans.

Therefore, it would seem that the USA today is perhaps not telling the truth in saying that Bush would outvote to caucus 48% to 42%.

If Democrats are voting in twice the numbers as Republicans, it seems to be a very fallacious poll.

Caller, let me ask you, do you think that the turnout for the primaries had anything to do

with what it would look like in the general election coming in November?

I think that in general, yes.

That it’s a valid percentage.

OK, let me ask Vlade to respond to your point.

I didn’t quite understand the point.

The point is that in the Super Tuesday voting, two to one Democratic voters over Republican voters.

Therefore, the poll in the USA today that suggested that George Bush would beat Mike Dukakis if it was not accurate.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about questions of arithmetic.

Bush won’t have the numbers.

He won’t get out as many voters to vote Republican as Reagan did.

Meaning Reagan was able to appeal to traditionally non-Republican voters to a much larger degree than Bush supposedly will be able to.

And I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

It will depend on what kind of vice presidential nominee Bush has.

If it’s Jack Kemp, I think he’ll be safe.

Chris, your reaction to the numbers game?

She’s done better number crunching than I have.

I mean, I think I would be very skeptical of any projection into November from the figure so far.

OK, pegging off on what she said, do these primaries indicate that this will be– in your opinion,

are there other forces that work in the primaries than there would be in a general election?

I mean, the percentages in Florida were like 22% of the eligible voters came out to vote in the general election.

The worst case was 53.6, I think, in the last election.

Yes, which is still incredibly low.

And I think it’s the result of the voters feeling that the process is decided before they’re asked.

That things are all packaged and then presented to them.

They’re not sovereign in the process.

Americans are famous for having many interests.

A number of people simply aren’t interested in politics.

They’re happy with things the way they are.

Los Angeles, you’re next.

I want to welcome Christopher Hitchens.

But I hope he stays in the United States, where he’s giving expert advice to the American people.

Walter Charles Krasinski made the insulting remark about Jesse Jackson making a, quote, “shakedown,” unquote, on McDonald’s.

Well, George Bush, Gephardt, and all the others make shakedowns also, since he likes to use that term.

That is why the campaign– there should be campaign reform in this country before it is completely corrupted.

It’s corrupted now.

But before it was completely 100% corrupted, we need complete campaign reform.

And I agree with Christopher Hitchens’ proposals.

And perhaps I would even go further than that.

I think that his proposals are a starting place to go from.

And again, I hope that he still will have Norm Chomsky on sometime.

He’s another excellent person.

All right.

Thank you.

We’d be glad to have him on.

Reaction?

I’ll let him know.

Well, thank you very much.

What can I say?

Nice to see you.

Yeah, I have nothing to add to that, but it is nice that Mr. Hitchens has a few people out there who agree with him.

One of the towns in Michael Dukakis’ life, Haverhill, Massachusetts.

Go ahead, please.

You’re on the air.

Just check the button.

You’re on the air, Haverhill.

Go ahead, please.

OK.

I’d like to make a comment about our esteemed, unquote, “governor” in Massachusetts, Dukakis.

He’s the biggest fraud that was ever perpetrated upon the people of Massachusetts.

And he talks in both sides of his mouth.

On one hand, down on the south, he told us we ought to get tough on hijackers.

And he can’t control his own convicted, vicious, first degree murderers who he lets out in the street.

Thank you, sir.

That’s one of our magical violators of our 30-day policy.

And he also lies about where he comes from, which is something that we have to put up with here from time to time.

He’s familiar, isn’t he?

Well, we have a 30-day policy.

People aren’t allowed to call over 30 days.

Then some people call us and tell us that they’re from Massachusetts, they’re from California, and it throws everybody off.

And so we’ll go to San Diego.

Go ahead, San Diego.

Hi, I’d like to say that, first of all, C-SPAN is the greatest political program I’ve seen today.

And I’d like to compliment Mr.

Hitchens on standing up for Mr. Jackson.

He’s one of the first things– first people I’ve seen do so.

And I’d like to make– or at least ask the question, how is it that America is

supposed to change the way of the world, which is what hopefully we would like

to do if we don’t change our basic policies and our basic thoughts towards a third world?

A third world is going to be– or are right now the majority.

So we need someone who is going to take this country into a new political arena or a new stance.

And I think the way to do it is to try and be friends with everyone.

No one– none of the other political candidates are even thinking on that idea.

Jesse Jackson may have very liberal ideas.

The insinuation of communism is absolutely ridiculous.

And again, I say C-SPAN is a great program.

Thank you very much, sir.

We appreciate it.

Chris?

Yeah.

It reminds me to say something I meant to say earlier.

When the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a liberal left organization, endorsed

Jackson not long ago, Jackson’s people actually returned the endorsement because it’s–

I mean, I just thought I’d mention it because of all these attributions of extremism to him.

I mean, I am on the extreme left myself.

And I can just tell you that Jesse Jackson isn’t.

More is the pity, in my view.

He’s just a good candidate in other respects.

Do Americans tolerate people who are on the extreme left in this country?

Yeah, I think they do.

I think if you– look, if you put it to someone and say, look, is so-and-so a communist,

that’s a particular word suggesting someone is a slavery supporter of the Soviet Union.

Nobody’s in favor of that.

I think, as a matter of fact, some of the things that people who are said to be on the extreme left

happen to believe are widely respected.

Let me give an example from the gentleman’s question about the third world.

The other night at his press conference, the president of the United States said that the problem in South Africa was not one of racism.

It’s a problem of tribalism.

And that the– in effect, gave the government there a leg up, a clean bill.

Now, most of the American public is perfectly capable of knowing for itself

and deciding that’s untrue and is worried that the United States is on the wrong

side in the battle for South Africa, which is going to be– already is, in fact–

a titanic battle, the last battle against colonialism

in Africa, a battle on the scale of the battle for the independence of India.

At the moment, Reagan has committed the US on the wrong side of that.

Most Americans think it should be the other way around.

And they’re right.

That’s not an extreme left point of view, though it is a point of view held by the extreme left.

Most Americans want to see an end to apartheid in South Africa.

And yet, most Americans also want

to see South Africa remain a thriving economic state, which brings economic benefit to not only whites, but blacks.

And blacks not only in South Africa, but from neighboring regions who flock into South Africa for jobs and other economic opportunities.

The danger, I think, in bashing South Africa, from Mr.

Hitchens’ point of view,

is simply that it will tear down the system as it exists there today and replace it with something

that we have in Angola, Mozambique, or Rhodesia, which will lead to economic disarray, decline, and poverty for the region as a whole.

Quick comment from both of you.

Has the nation endorsed anybody for president?

Not yet, no.

Will they?

Yeah, we generally do.

I mean, I think the staff and contributors would be divided between Jackson and Dukakis.

How about the American Spectator?

We do not endorse candidates.

Carbondale, Illinois, you’re next.

Yeah, it’s hard to hear you.

Now that the socialists have taken over the Democratic Party, it seems like

we’re having a lot of trial by innuendo, particularly with the Ed Meese thing.

Another thing about Jesse Jackson, I got a lot of problems with him.

When he was head of Operation Push, it seems like there were, I think, $1 or $2 million that were unaccounted for.

Also, Jackson not only did when he went down to Cuba and put his arm around,

fidelity, long live President Castro, like Castro was elected or something.

He not only said that, but he said long live Che Chavarria, long live Patrice

Lumumba, which is about two of the most bloodiest revolutionaries in modern times.

That’s all I have to say.

OK, thank you.

Reaction?

Yeah, well, I’d like to bring the discussion back to the third world for a moment.

When people such as the previous caller

called for a new approach to the third world and so on and so forth, all I can think of

is that most rhetoric in the US about the third world

tends to focus on South Africa, if not South Africa, then Israel.

And currently, I think Israel is in the lead as the country being most frequently bashed by progressive opinion in this country.

I mean, Israel, a tiny country in the Middle East, beleaguered country, yet it is sort

of the major cause for all unhappiness in the third world.

The Chicago Tribune put several reporters onto the push account, the push audit,

and admitted after a very, very long investigation they couldn’t find anything to stick on Jesse Jackson.

Now, I don’t know if they asked all the right questions,

but I know that they had a very intense investigation and they came up with nothing.

But since you mentioned innuendo, I wonder how you think it is that the liberals

and socialists of the Democratic Party have invented all this stuff about Edmees.

I mean, where did we forge the WEDTEC contract?

Where did we print the papers about the Iraqi pipeline contract?

Where did we come up with all the business of rewarding his creditors with jobs that the Attorney General has engaged in?

It is simply paranoid to say that this is a smear.

All the evidence that’s surfaced has surfaced in spite of Mr.

Mies, and it’s on the record formulated by nobody.

It just exists objectively.

If it doesn’t disturb you, fair enough.

But you shouldn’t really say that the evidence has been invented.

Well, by singling out such evidence as you pointed to, I think you’re simply ignoring what

goes on in the world of politics today at every level on both left and right.

And I think it’s being mindlessly, I think, hypocritical to pretend that politics

is something much more high-minded and clean.

Let’s go to Tucson, Arizona.

You’re next.

Thank you.

Next to Reagan, I don’t believe there is anything on the right.

I’m not sure of him.

Everyone else looks like they’re far left as far as the political spectrum goes.

I did have a question on Iran for Christopher, since he appears to be such an expert.

There’s a question I’ve had from the beginning of that affair.

That is from the beginning of the revolution in Iran

that has never even been touched that I know of.

And that is, what was the Ayatollah doing in France, sort of hiding away in France during the

time when the Shah was still there, knowing that the Western world of France is like a power seat.

And they knew what he was going to be doing, going back to Iran

and to catalyze the people to himself.

It would have been very simple at that time to just do him away and solve the problem from the very, very beginning.

So what was he really doing there?

Was he really their man to start with and to ride the revolution for 30 years

or 20 years or whatever it took and eventually hand it back to the empire?

Chris?

Well, the Ayatollah was in France

because he’d been expelled from Iraq, where he had been in exile from Iran in the Shia Muslim holy city of Najaf, which is in Iran.

The Iraqis got nervous and expelled him.

The French took him.

The French liked to be on both sides of all questions in the Middle East and succeed tremendously well as a general rule.

I think, though, they, along with everyone else, doing the Iraqis

consistently underestimated the appeal of the Ayatollah to the Iranian people.

So I don’t think it really crossed anyone’s mind that he was a threat while he was living in Noye.

In November of this year, it’s possible that we’ll be able to peek into the British House of Commons.

They’re going to go on television for a six month experiment.

What do you think that impact will

have on Margaret Thatcher’s government?

Well, it surprises me that she’s allowed cameras into the chamber.

She voted against it.

I always thought they’d be– yes.

They didn’t– the government didn’t oppose the move, which it had been expected to do.

She’s against it personally.

I think because of the way the British chamber is organized– people know

this– Winston Churchill had it rebuilt exactly as it was after it was bombed.

So there isn’t enough room for everyone to sit down.

This is supposed to be a very intimate atmosphere that forces people to confront one another.

I mean, if you saw a British question time, you’d wish that the president had to face one twice a week.

Well, the American audience liked what they said.

I think that the effect of television on that may be dampening, actually.

And it may simply tend to favor people who are good comedians or glib speakers.

But I’m very traditional about that kind of thing.

So you’re not in favor of it?

Not terribly.

Last call from Twin Rivers, New Jersey.

Go ahead, please.

Yes.

I’d like to address my question to Mr.

Plazinski and his views concerning the Reverend Jackson’s campaign.

I find that he has a problem in the fact that he mentioned Reverend Jackson’s

travels abroad as being something that was a dishonor to the country.

I find that to be rather shocking concerning the results of Reverend Jackson’s trips, which

have brought back prisoners, have certainly done nothing to dishonor this country.

I do find a problem with this administration, however, that has done the same thing, causing disservice to our country in Iran, Nicaragua,

the problem of drug running, which this country’s administration has admitted that they’ve been involved with.

How do you square all this with your statements concerning Reverend Jackson’s dishonor to this country

when you have an administration that seems to have done precisely the things you’re talking about?

Thank you, sir.

Well, first of all, I don’t understand–

if cavorting with Fidel Castro, or the dictator of Syria,

does not bring dishonor to our country, I don’t know what does.

Perhaps Mr. Jackson’s relationship

with Louis Farhan, probably the most virulently anti-Semitic,

anti-white person in America.

It is astounding that Mr. Jackson continues

to enjoy respect in the political community given these relationships.

In the New York Times this morning, the wife of Senator Albert Gore, Tipper Gore, has an op-ed piece curbing the sexploitation industry.

We both, I’m sure, have seen previous remarks on this.

Is this helping or hurting his candidacy?

I hope it’s hurting it.

I mean, I think the news– the word is out on the teenage sex.

I think it would be quite difficult to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

I don’t think Mrs. Gore is going to be the one to do it.

And I think she should give up trying for everybody’s sake, not just for his.

No, I mean, Mrs. Gore tends to be much more impressive than her husband.

And she has a basic sense that there’s too much vulgarity in our culture.

And it’s vulgarity that just goes uncensored, just

as simply as sort of forced on the country as a whole.

And people cannot react strong enough against it because then they are called prudes and censors.

And I think she’s trying to restore a sense of decency to our country.

Chris Hitchens, what are you writing in the March 12th issue, which is the next one after this one?

I’m going to ask ABC News if Henry Kissinger will continue

to be their impartial consultant, having called for the press to be banned from the West Bank.

And Vlade Plosinski, what can we look forward to in the April issue of the American Spectator?

We have a major expose of the Center for Defense Information,

a major kind of apologist for Soviet behavior in the world, and led by Admiral LaRocque.

In the media, at least, it’s a highly respected military watchdog.

We could try to shed some new light on this dangerous organization.

Vlade Plosinski is the managing editor

of the American Spectator.

He is originally from Santa Barbara, California.

And Christopher Hitchens is a columnist with The Nation.

He’s been at The Nation since 1978.

He’s originally from Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

Thank you both for joining us.

And thank you, audience.

Have a good day.

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If you have questions or comments for either of our guests, you can

write to Vladeslav Plosinski at the American Spectator.

The address is 1101 North Highland Street, Arlington, Virginia, 22210.

Christopher Hitchens can be reached in care of The Nation.

That address is 72 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10011.

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